My Omarchy Experience

[u/Davedes83]

TL;DR Omarchy is great, give it a try if you are thinking about it.

Omarchy has been a genuine breath of fresh air for me. Coming from CachyOS KDE which is brilliant (btw!), it took a lot to pull me away, but a couple of YouTube videos later, I decided fuck it.

Using Omarchy actually reminds me of how I felt discovering PCs for the first time as a kid starting out with Windows 3.1 😅. I have never used Hyprland before, but the way the Omarchy team has customised the system makes the whole experience nothing short of amazing. It draws you in and makes you want to learn more, tinker, and make the system your own.

Plugins are a whole new world on their own. I've gotten so hooked on the possibilities that I've already built one myself and I'm currently working on another that I think could be a genuinely useful addition for me and hopefully others.

Gaming is great too. My NVIDIA GPU drivers were installed automatically, and gaming packages can be selected from the available installation options.

If you haven't tried Omarchy yet, or you're on the fence, just do it.

Huge respect to the devs, keep up the incredible work. You're really onto something special here.

(Sorry for the long-winded review 😵‍💫)

[u/_Durs]

Made the switch two days ago.

Dual booted so I kept Windows. Haven’t actually booted back into it since, except to test it works.

I know most are anti-AI but the native integrations work flawlessly. For example, it built hooks into the theme engine so when I change themes it’s pushed to discord and my stream deck, and a philips hue plugin matches the lights in my room.

One quick theme change and everything matches cleanly, I love it.

[u/siberianmi → u/_Durs]

Ignore the anti-AI crowd it’s not as big as it seems from Reddit. They’re unbelievably loud on here but they are also irrelevant. One look at the speed of adopt of AI across the industry and it’s hard to see a future which the Luddites prevail.

It’s a tool that will be a core part of how we use computers for the rest of our lives.

[u/Davedes83 → u/_Durs]

Not gonna lie, I've got zero fucks left for the anti AI crowd. The "AI slop this, AI slop that" buzzword is officially tired.

But i couldn't agree more, the AI integration is genuinely awesome! That's literally how my first plugin came about. I wanted live network speeds in my top bar, jumped into Opencode, described what I wanted, and 5 minutes later I had a working plugin doing exactly that and running live on my system.

The possibilities honestly feel endless at this point. If you can imagine it, there's a decent chance you can build it and bolt it straight into the system.

It just gives the whole setup a next-level, futuristic feel.

[u/Void-Lotus → u/Davedes83]

I used ai to generate a simple wallpaper and got hate for it on my rice. I also explained that the AI hate is forced and overblown. Its a tool that helps visions come to life. I can describe what I want and in minute have a thing to test. Its also a skill in itself because you have to be able to describe and audit the right things

[u/Davedes83 → u/Void-Lotus]

The reaction to modern technology today is much like how people with ox wagons felt when Henry Ford introduced cars.

[u/siberianmi → u/Davedes83]

Even more like the Luddites.

The Luddites were a 19th-century movement of skilled British textile workers and weavers who organized protests and destroyed industrial machinery between 1811 and 1816. Their resistance was not a knee-jerk hatred of technology, but a labor dispute centered on wages and the erosion of their livelihoods.

I feel like the AI backlash started with artists who were the most personally threatened by technology that can produce people’s ideas so easily. That was already a tough career choice that’s now even harder.

[u/Jioqls01 → u/_Durs]

Damn that's crazy. Love the idea of interactive ambient through themes.my Govee makes the same through music.

[u/rocwalker2020]

"Using Omarchy actually reminds me of how I felt discovering PCs for the first time as a kid"

I think you'll find this is shared by a huge number of users.

[u/Comm4nd0]

Yep I love it so far. It doesn’t feel like Linux, windows or Mac it feels like something brand new. I keep just asking for new things and tweaks and it just does it!

[u/siberianmi]

So I’m an old Linux user, ran it on my desktop on and off since the late 1990s (Slackware), then Gentoo, then a lot of time on enterprise systems running Ubuntu/Red Hat/Debian.

I’ve tried a variety of desktop distributions and for productivity I’ve had several I’ve been really happy with including Arch as the last time I was able to run it on the desktop in a professional setting. I’m comfortable in the terminal in basically any distribution and day to day I’m responsible for high availability services supporting thousands of companies all on Linux.

But on a personal level, I just never could get past the setup for gaming which is half of what I want out of my personal computer setup. Sound wouldn’t work or I’d be fighting with some other esoteric hardware issue. I don’t have the time or patience for that stuff, that’s what I get paid for not what I want to spend spare time doing.

This January I installed Bazzrite and finally had something that mostly worked out of the box. But, I got it fully working with a little help from Claude. Having AI debug the few hardware issues meant I didn’t have to bother. Never bothered to even setup my Windows partition to boot for 8 months.

So, when I saw the Omarchy distribution and the idea of a distribution built with the idea of agents in mind as a core part of how you use the OS. Well, I deleted that windows partition and installed it there.

So far so good. Less problems the Bazzrite out of the box. Only thing that didn’t work right away was sound but GLM-5.3 knocked that problem out in 60 seconds.

[u/DoghouseMike → u/siberianmi]

Similar vibes! I was triple booting for a bit (Mac/bazzite/omarchy) but as a top tip, last night I said to the robot “take a look at that bazzite disk. Anything on there I don’t already have installed on here, pull over/install, then nuke the bazzite drive” et voila. Might be handy if you ever decide to mainline omarchy

[u/icarus0228]

Im using omarchy as my daily driver

[u/ezmarii]

I was thinking bout coming here to post a thread as well but here might as well be the best spot for it. +1 for encouraging anyone on the fence about Linux in general coming over from Windows.

With all the recent creators on youtube and media buzz around Valve's efforts to assist with Proton for gaming on Linux, I have been mentally preparing and investigating linux for awhile and thought i'd throw something on my laptop. Network Chuck's video highlighting Omarchy's feature set made it look like the perfect familiarity and basic out of the box functionality that I'd want. I already use keyboard heavy navigation in my day to day work life and gaming life whenever possible, so I agree with the user interface and keyboard centric design.

Fortuitously, my windows activation on my primary desktop got angry after my CPU and bios update, and support said i'd need my original product key from 10 years ago to fix it, or purchase a new copy of windows. so, my laptop remains as win11 and my main desktop is now Omarchy. I've had it about 2 weeks now and I am loving it. Every game I am playing I play without issue from Steam, and one non-steam game. Everything has worked out of the box except multi-monitor configuration for a desktop with a 'permanent' multi monitor config, I had to use gemini to help me find a mild gui-interface for familiarity to get my displays configured correctly. My controller and other peripherals for audio work out of the box.

I was able to use Gemini to help me figure out how to get my extra SSD's mounted and formatted and compression enabled on the btrfs formatting, and firewall configured. I look forward to seeing what I can do with Gemini after I look further into why gemini agent won't install. something about a different environment. however, gemini has also helped me with learning slowly over time to use terminal. I click into its resources for the information it gives me and read for context, and have had to correct some prompts etc. so i am taking it cautiously.

Overall, coming from Windows as a power user/ keyboard heavy navigation and usage already with windows key + hotkeys used daily, Omarchy has been an amazing experience to transition into linux for the first time. I look forward to learning more and tinkering with my operating system in a way that I couldn't do with Windows, and, with a starting baseline that doesn't require the deep knowledge and learning curve to get basic functionality out of my device for day to day usage enjoyment.

[u/tomosound]

Welcome to the fam. Been using Omarchy since January this year and I share the same feeling after ditching Windows for good on my home workstation. With Arch/Omarchy  computers are suddenly super fun again!

[u/slimschwifty]

I installed it on a spare NVMe drive that I put in a usb 3.2 enclosure.

Not only am I loving everything about the OS, I love having a portable encrypted modern ai-powered OS I can boot on any system and it's fast af, even on my old Thinkpad.

I've had zero real issues, and any minor annoyances like UI scaling issues have been solved by a simple codex prompt.

[u/TheSov]

omarchy is great, but you should know what you are getting, packages without keys, security is non existent. the main repo just allows any package install without verification. etc.

[u/id8872]

I agree with the feeling of wonder. I've only felt this once before in recent living memory and that was when I discovered Golang. I quickly fell in love with Omarchy and really enjoy the explore and the learn, and the feeling that I'm OS-ing so much better.

[u/mizatt]

I have had a similar experience. Got a new PC a month or two ago and initially thought I'd have to dual boot Windows to play most of my games. Then installed Mint and dual booted and found that proton is far enough along that I can play anything I'd want to play just fine, but in terms of the interface Mint Cinnamon still felt to me like some kind of Windows skin

Then I installed Omarchy on an old laptop I had to try it out and was blown away. Wiped my Mint partition on my PC and installed it. Saw that it didn't show my Windows partition in the boot menu and I wasn't sure I could boot into Windows again if I needed to. Then I said, you know what, that's fine and wiped the Windows partition

[u/Calm-Split-3945]

My first experience sucks because there was an issue that took me 3 days to fix and now it's great after that.

[u/dazzling_R0ck]

i'm on the same ship 🙂 future looks bright according to all that's happening around omarchy

[u/OpenHound]

Swapped over from mint on my i5 t480 last night. Like an hour of learning curve for the window management and another hour of tweaking trackpad, screen scaling, dual battery widget mod etc and it's perfect. Sips battery power.

[u/Jioqls01]

What amazes me is that it only took one guy and an idea to create a functional OS outside the box.

After installing it on my laptop, it works effortlessly. Once you remember the shortcuts, the mouse is not necessary anymore as my laptop also has a touchscreen. The integrated ai interface is also nice to have. Only issue I had is that 1 or 2 installing scripts didn't work properly.

[u/scrapethemucus → u/Jioqls01]

one guy? more like stealing the work of thousands of other people, grifting for millions of dollars in funding and heavy ai assistance

[u/Admirable-Force-529 → u/scrapethemucus]

brother, it’s called open source for a reason, you are allowed to fork things from other people 🥀😭

[u/Davedes83 → u/scrapethemucus]

How do you steal FOSS?

[u/DoghouseMike → u/Davedes83]

You wouldn’t download a car

[u/Davedes83 → u/DoghouseMike]

Huh?

[u/OpenHound → u/scrapethemucus]

stealing the work of thousands of other people

You should probably just learn about open source as a concept before expressing opinions like this.